Madhya Pradesh: Panna tiger travels 150 kms to reach UP villages

BHOPAL: Forest departments from two neighbouring states of Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh are monitoring movement of a tiger sighted in the farm fields of distant villages of Bundelkhand in Uttar Pradesh. The big cat seems to have strayed away from Panna tiger reserve (PTR) , the only source population about 150 kms away from the village near Hamirpur in UP where it was fist sighted on November 22.
This was first ever sighting of Royal Bengal tiger in this part of Bundelkhand when a villager first spotted it and informed the local police.
There are about 50 tigers in the PTR including the cubs and sub- adult tigers, said the director of the park KS Bhadoria, and a large number of them sighted in the buffer zone also.
"There are all the possibilities that one of these may have dispersed”, he told TOI.
The tiger , it appears, travelled along the banks of the Ken river, the life line of Bundelkhand in UP and MP.
The officials of the forest department of the Bundelkhand range of UP have identified as many as 7 villages in Hamirpur- Mahoba districts where the tiger had passed through.
The officials so far did not get a chance to see the tiger from close quarters and some villagers had taken photographs from a long distance with their mobile phones.
In 2016, one tigress from Panna had strayed using an old jungle corridor and travelled to about 50 to Ranipur sanctuary near Chitrakoot in UP.
Known as T213(22), the tigress has now made Ranipura sanctuary its home.
The radio collared tigress was roaming around the jungles of Mirjapur forest and Satna forest divisions. The two states had then agreed to monitor the tigress together whenever it was crisscrossing the borders.
As the tigress was radio collared, it was easy to monitor its location.
But the tiger that was sighted on Hamirpur-Mahoba region had travelled from Panna to Bandaa along Ken river and then strayed to Hamirpur.